Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

6 healthcare startups that are transforming patient care

It was incredibly hard to restrict myself to a handful of healthcare startups and initiatives […]

It was incredibly hard to restrict myself to a handful of healthcare startups and initiatives that have made an impact this year or made significant progress towards their goal of improving patient care. Certainly there were some critical milestones that will improve the viability of companies in some digital health subsectors. The news that doctors will be reimbursed for helping Medicare patients manage multiple chronic conditions, per patient, per month is one example. Another is the growing trend of expanding telemedicine reimbursement by both public and private payers and state governments passing legislation to expand or legalize the practice.

Mine is far from an exhaustive list. The companies I interviewed and read about this year that impressed me are ones taking different but logical approaches spanning patient data security, managing diet, and improving the speed at which complex data is used and visualized. You can also check out lists from my colleagues Meghana Keshavan and Dan Verel.

Haystack Informatics takes an unusual approach to helping hospitals manage the huge responsibility of protecting patient data by making it easier not only to spot a breach but also to identify its source. The spinout of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia founded by the Chief Medical Information Officer at CHOP — Bimal Desai — and Adrian Talapan, the CEO, is part of a program by DreamIt Ventures to help institutions and companies identify technology that can be commercialized called Open Canvas. Haystack’s technology is not a solution to the cause of a lot of data breaches — losing a laptop or device. But its visualization tool makes it easier to detect and trace unauthorized access. I had never appreciated the problem of data breaches by snooping health staff curious about a friend, neighbor or just a person of interest to them. Automating the lengthy task of paging through spreadsheets and creating an easy to use visualization tool will help hospitals identify and respond to these kind of breaches faster.It will be exciting to see how the company progresses next year.

2Morrow Many digital health companies are using behavior change as a way to encourage patients to adopt a healthier lifestyle, particularly if they have a chronic condition. Smoking cessation programs are a good example. 2Morrow reached a couple of important milestones to support the launch of its SmartQuit app this year. The company licensed its SmartQuit app to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to commercialize the app, which is clinically proven to help users give up smoking. A double blind randomized control study pitted its app against the National Cancer Institute’s application for smoking cessation, QuitGuide. According to the study, SmartQuit users opened their app more frequently (more than 37 times) compared to the NCI app (15.2 times). About 13 percent of users quit smoking compared with the National Cancer Institute’s app. It was an auspicious year to get those results as 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of a landmark report on smoking by the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office. An update of that report showed that 480,000 have died from smoking and diseases caused by smoking add up to $280 billion in healthcare and employer productivity costs.

Nutrify: App stores are loaded with diet tools. But while they may be helpful for day-to-day use, registered dietician Jackie Arnett founded this mobile health company to customize meal recommendations, particularly for people in the hospital who are about to be discharged. It lists recipes with ingredients that takes into consideration things like chronic conditions, medication and recent surgery. It’s a rejection of the generic dietary apps that serve as glorified calorie counters and are designed to provide a more personalized approach to managing dietary needs.

First Opinion takes a novel approach to its medical query service for consumers by using doctors who are stay-at-home moms. CEO McKay Thomas explained that he wanted to physicians who could work for the company full-time so women who want to spend at least their children’s early years at home but want to continue to work seems like a great option. The service is designed to eliminate unnecessary trips to the emergency rooms by providing guidance through text messages. When people register they are paired with a physician so they can develop a rapport with that doctor. If they pay extra, consumers can use the service to access specialists. It raised $6 million in December to expand the business.

Validic had a great year. The health IT company provides a data aggregation tool to de-silo patient data from apps, wearables and medical devices, so that information can be put into context of patients’ health. Earlier this year it said it grew its collaboration pool by 25 percent before addingthe likes of Pfizer and Everyday Health earlier this month. Its partnership with Glooko offered a particularly compelling example of how its tecghnoloy can be used. Glooko collaborated with Joslin Diabetes Center to develop HypoMap — a way for diabetics to avoid hypoglycemic events based on the patient’s activity and food intake. Validic made its first acquisition to expand from its Durham, North Carolina base to the West Coast. It also raised a $5 million Series A funds to expand the service it provides hospitals, health systems and pharmaceutical companies.

MakerNurse is the odd one out of my selections. It’s not a company, so much as an initiative to raise awareness and encourage innovation by the people who tend to have the most direct contact with patients — nurses.  Jose-Gomez Marquez and Anna Young are behind the initiative, hatched from MIT’s Little Devices Lab last year with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. One goal is to collect stories from nurses around the country to highlight how they identified problems they and hospital staff encountered and developed a way to make improvements. Marquez is also co-inventor of the MEDIKit platform, a series of design building blocks that empower doctors and nurses in developing countries to invent their own medical technologies.  Young highlighted a low-cost approach to helping patients with diabetes use corn pads to prevent small wounds on their feet into mushrooming into wounds that need hospital care. The idea is help nurses advance their innovative, practical ideas to improve patient care within their hospital’s administration. A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation pioneering ideas podcast earlier this year included three maker nurses the initiative identified from its open houses around the country.

Photo from Flickr

Shares0
Shares0